In machine learning, a convolutional neural network (e.g., convnet) is a type of feed-forward artificial neural network in which the connectivity pattern between its neurons is inspired by the organization of the animal visual cortex. Individual cortical neurons respond to stimuli in a restricted region of space known as the receptive field. The receptive fields of different neurons partially overlap such that they tile the visual field. The response of an individual neuron to stimuli within its receptive field can be approximated mathematically by a convolution operation. Convolutional networks were inspired by biological processes and are variations of multilayer perceptrons designed to use minimal amounts of preprocessing. They have wide applications in image and video recognition, recommender systems and natural language processing.